During the 11 years that Married With Children was on the air, I never understood the appeal of the show or the humor in watching the dysfunctional Bundy family, with the deadbeat father (Al), the obnoxious wife (Peggy), the dim and promiscuous daughter (Kelly) and the girl-crazy, wiseass son (Bud). Watching and re-watching the billiards TV episode “Cheese, Cues and Blood,” which aired in September 1991 as part of the show’s sixth season, did nothing to make me feel I had missed out. Its poorly-staged and imbecilic treatment of pool only furthered that discontentment.
The premise of this particular billiards TV episode is that Kelly (played by Christina Applegate, who actually does have the comedic chops, as evidenced by her terrific role in Anchorman), needs “only $1,000” for a gown so she compete for the “coveted title of Miss Cheese.” She can’t wear one of her other gowns because they “smell like pork and old men’s hands.” When Al won’t give her the money, she “gets a night job,” earns $1000 and buys the dress herself. Al isn’t sure how his dim-witted daughter got the money, but he rules out his neighbor’s suggestion that it was from “spanking elderly gentlemen in a tight leather outfit.” Cue the laugh-track, as lo and behold, Kelly then leaves for the night in a lava-hot black leather outfit. Still confused, Al finally suspects she’s whoring when he gets a call for Kelly and hears a guy “has the money and can’t wait to learn if she is as good as the guys say she is.”
It’s not the worst premise, but the show deteriorates when he realizes that, rather than prostituting, Kelly is “hustling pool.” At the pool hall, which looks more like a campus rec center, the patrons gaggle and ogle, watching Kelly hustle. EXCEPT, it’s a total mystery to me what possible game she is playing or how she is hustling. She’s shooting stripes into solids, there is no 8- or 9-ball on the table, and the game suddenly ends when she pockets the 5-ball, though both solids and stripes remain on the table. It’s like my 7-year-old came up with the rules of the game. Granted, I realize it’s a sitcom and therefore not best to over-analyze, but really…wasn’t there one person on the set who played pool and could have said, “Hey guys, this might work a tad better if we at least pretended to inject a dose of reality into the game?”
The laughs hit an all-time low when Kelly is challenged by Slick Stick Jackson, who enters proclaiming he’s got “$10,000 that says he can beat any girl in the house.” (Doesn’t that happen all the time?) To back the bet, Al sells nine pints of his blood (i.e., the “blood” in the title “Cheese, Cues and Blood”), becomes delirious, hallucinates, and inadvertently sabotages the game. All I can say is given how stale the jokes were and how badly the pool was represented, I’m glad the game was over.
The full episode is available to watch above on YouTube.
